Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (24 page)

She just waited silently, a look of concern on her face. I lifted my left arm
to give her a space and reached across with my right to take her hand from where it rested on my shoulder and pull her gently across towards me. Without a word she moved over to nestle up against me, her arm stretched across my chest, her head resting on my shoulder as she waited for an answer if one was going to come. She knew that it was up to me what I wanted to say. That there was nothing she could say which would make me talk. She could just wait and hope and see what I felt I could tell her, when I felt I could say it.

‘
It’s Dazza,’ I said at last. It felt as though the words were being wrenched out of me with pliers.

‘
Of course it is,’ she said gently, ‘I knew that. But what about him?’

‘
He’s using the guys.’

‘
Using them? How?’

‘
He’s using their loyalty to the club and to each other to exploit them.’

‘
But he’s not used you to do anything you don’t want to do has he?’

‘
No.’

‘
Then what’s your problem?’ she challenged, ‘It’s up to all the guys to decide for themselves what they will or won’t do isn’t it? You all make your own choices and live by them don’t you? That’s what you always do.’

She was right.

‘I don’t understand. You’re an outlaw biker. You’ve always been about being free and not taking any shit from anyone. So what’s all this crap with Dazza?’

The crap wasn
’t with Dazza, that’s what she didn’t get yet. The trouble was Dazza. Dazza and what he was capable of. What he was capable of and what it meant for us.

And by us I didn
’t mean the club. I meant Sharon, and me.

I meant Gyppo, admitting to myself for the first time what had really been festering away, growing like a tumour in the da
rk of my mind.

Like Gyppo, the whacked out, paranoid, raving
speed freak that I had last seen losing it that night where Dazza, his supplier, could see it.

Deep down I had to admit to myself, I had never
completely believed Gyppo’s death was an accident.

But
now it was all happening again.
Like last time,
the copper’s voice came back to me.

‘
Listen, I knew Gyppo sure did downers but did he ever really do smack?’

‘
Not while I was with him. Why’d you ask? Why bring that up now?’

But you weren
’t at the end were you, I thought? But for once in my life I did think before I opened my mouth, and having thought, I bit my tongue and kept it shut.

‘
Nothing. Just thinking about Tiny that’s all.’

Even now, four or five years later, the wounds were too fresh and too painful for h
urtful words.

‘
Don’t worry about it,’ I said as I turned out the light and we lapsed into silence.

*

I was later than usual for prayers on Monday. Fat Mick was on duty indoors when I got there, the others had obviously already all gone up. ‘Hey, have you heard the news?’ he asked as he buzzed me in through the steel door.

‘
No? What news?’

‘
It’s Butcher.’

‘
What about him?’

‘
He’s been topped.’

‘
Topped? Christ, how? When?’

‘
Shot sounds like. Somebody took him out round the back of his shop. Execution style it sounds like.’
[11]

‘Bloody hell, do we know who?’

‘
Well you need to see Dazza about that.’

‘
Dazza? What’s he got to do with it?’

‘
You’ll find out,’ he said with a grin. There was no love lost there for Butcher from Fat Mick which I could understand. Still, for all his faults, Butcher had been a full patch and Fat Mick was still a striker so he ought to show some respect, ‘He’s upstairs in the meeting room, telling the guys.’

And so he was. He was being careful abou
t the words that he actually used, we swept regularly, and there were only full patches present, but hey you never knew, but the message was clear. Butcher had been left in charge, Butcher had exceeded his authority, Butcher had used his brief to settle personal beefs and Dazza had as a result been forced to come back to take over personal control and sort things out. And no one was left in any doubt about what sorting things out meant. Butcher had crossed the line and now Butcher had paid the price.

I got fined for being late into the meeting of course.

*

She
and I both know there’s some music I just can’t listen to.

I
t’s fairly obvious that if I start to want to listen to the Wall, or the hollowness of Bauhaus, or some Mötorhead, that I’m going into one of my self-destructive cycles.

‘
What’s up?’ she asked as I killed the grinding guitars and we hit the sack.

I could see the worry in her eyes.
But I just didn’t know how to tell her anything.

I knew that I had killed Billy. I don
’t just mean that I pressed the button. I mean that I had been responsible for him getting killed.

Billy had known what he was talking about alright.
Dazza would have got Butcher to do it.

Or me.

It was what I had been trying to, or not trying to talk to her about the previous evening. We were being used, Dazza was using our loyalty to set us up as his own personal support club.

‘
Listen, you know I wanted to look something up the other night?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
Well I found it.’

‘
So?’

‘
So, I wanted to tell you about it.’

‘
OK, but why?’

‘
Because it’s the only way that things makes sense to me.’

‘
So what’s to tell from your old book that makes sense of where you are today?’

‘
Well, let’s see what you think then. Have you ever heard of a guy called Cesare Borgia?’

‘
Borgia rings a bell I think, something about poisons perhaps?’

‘
You’re thinking of Lucretia, his sister.’

‘
OK.’

‘
So Cesare, who was also called Duke Valentino, he was the Pope’s son.’

‘
The Pope? You mean like the Holy fucking Father? Like the Vatican?’

‘
Yeah, second son actually. They think when he was twenty or so he had his elder brother knocked off to eliminate the competition although no one ever proved anything. This was way back at the end of the fourteen hundreds, start of the fifteen hundreds, things were way different then.’

‘
Christ almighty! What a family.’

‘
And Borgia wasn’t even one of the anti-Popes, he was the regular one, but it was all political back then, the church was a real power, and the Pope had armies and stuff just like any of the other princes.’

‘
Wow, I never knew that. So what about this Valentino then?’

‘
Duke Valentino. Like I say he was the Pope’s son and his dad Alexander the sixth wanted to carve out a kingdom for him in Italy. But he had a problem, he couldn’t give him one of the Church’s own states as that would antagonise too many of the other powers and he didn’t have many natural allies as none of the other princes wanted to allow the Church to get stronger by having the Pope or Cesare grab more territory.’

‘
So what did he do?’

‘
Simple, he stirred the shit. He did as much as he could to create turmoil amongst the other Italian states, all sorts of crap, and then gave the French king a divorce in return for the loan of his armies to Cesare so that he could make his first conquest of a place called the Romagna.

‘
So then Cesare’s taken Romagna and what does he find? He thinks the people who ran it before were weak, and to a degree he’s right, in that anyone can do what they like, there’s factions, chaos, you name it. So he decides, like you do, that it needs to be pacified, so that all his subjects will obey him and he can do what he wants.’

‘
So what’s he do? Go in with the big boots?’

‘
No, he doesn’t. That’s the clever part. What he does is he appoints someone else to rule it for him as his lieutenant, a guy called Remirro de Orco. Now this guy is a real hardnosed bastard and Cesare gives him
carte blanche
, tells him do what you like, but sort it out, no holds barred. And of course he goes out and does it.

‘
But then Cesare sees that not only has Remirro done enough, but that leaving him with so much authority might also be dangerous for Cesare. He also recognised that Remirro’s ruthlessness had become hated and some of that was rubbing off on him as well, so he had to do something about it.’

‘Like what?’

‘He decided to show that all the violence had been Remirro’s doing and not his, so everyone would think that everything bad that had happened had been down to Remirro. So one morning the city wakes up to find Remirro’s body hacked in half in the main square with the bloody knife left beside it.

‘
Everyone was so relieved that Remirro was gone and so impressed by how brutally and effectively it had been done that they were happy to give Cesare the credit, because of course, from then on everything was peaceful because Remirro had done all the dirty work that was needed before he got topped.’

‘
And you think that’s what Dazza did to Butcher? That Butcher was Dazza’s patsy?’ she thought about that for a moment, ‘But that means…’

‘
That Dazza was responsible for all the deaths?’

‘
Yes?’

I nodded.

‘What Tiny? And Billy too?’

‘
Yes, directly or indirectly. It’s the oldest trick in the book, isn’t it? Delegate all the dirty work to someone else and keep your own hands clean, because then you can then blame them, have them take the fall when you need them to.’

She hadn
’t yet made the connection back to Gyppo but that was now firmly in my mind. I didn’t know how long it would take her to make the leap but she would soon enough.

I could see
now how Dazza had always planned to use and then get rid of Butcher. It was all so obvious in retrospect. Just like Cesare he was presenting him now as a bad apple, as having been excessive in his cleaning out. By spreading the word amongst the guys that everything that had happened was down to Butcher’s personal beefs, he had ensured Butcher took all the blame for everything that had happened and then Dazza had come back in to take him out and claim the credit for restoring peace and prosperity. You could see the way his mind worked. He was brilliant.

The question was though,
as she asked it, what was I going to do about it now?

‘
So if he has taken out Butcher does that mean that everything’s now over?’

‘
I don’t know. Possibly,’ I conceded.

‘
So, should you just keep quiet?’

‘
Stay out of it d’you mean? Avoid any trouble?’

‘
Yes, I suppose so.’

‘
I don’t know if I can do that. Not after what’s happened to Tiny and Billy.’

‘
But if things are quiet shouldn’t you just let it go? After all Butcher, who’s the guy who actually did it, is dead. And you don’t actually know that Dazza actually ordered any of it. He wasn’t even there when Tiny got his was he? He was with you out in Portugal or wherever it was?’

She was right of course.
Again. But I had already made up my mind.

‘
You know you should never let something go just to avoid trouble.’ There was no avoiding trouble, I knew. All you ever did by not facing up to it today is to delay it until later to someone else’s advantage. Better to deal with something now when it’s small than have to face it later when it’s bigger or more of a threat.

‘
But why not just wait and see so you’re sure? Why risk trouble now for the sake of it?’

‘
It’s not for the sake of it. It’s because it’s necessary. Today I have a position, today I can trust to the power I’ve got. Who knows what will happen tomorrow or the day after? Dazza might get weaker, fine, but who knows, he might just as well get stronger. In fact given the hand he’s got to play at the moment that’s the most likely scenario. And if he does, what have I achieved by waiting? I’ve just fucked up. But if I go for it now, well, we’ll just see what happens won’t we?’